Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best

by Peter Freestone

  The whole point of this production from the Pagliacci opening onwards was to create a surreal fantasy. From the eyes sewn onto his costume to the feathers on his back, Freddie achieves the look of that of a giant prawn in a palace of excess. The voluptuous images were often more akin to nightmare. Many of Freddie’s Munich friends were involved, Barbara Valentin as the seductive temptress and Mack’s wife Ingrid feature heavily as does a transvestite ballerina, Kurt Raab whom we also knew by the name of Rebecca.

  The rest of the band were obviously somewhat bewildered which is maybe why it is so easy to play ‘Spot the Deliberate Mistake’. At one point, Roger is to be seen walking across the set in his trainers whereas in fact he should only have been in his tights. This incident indicates that not all the band were always in on the editing process. Had Roger been involved in this one, the mistake would probably never have been let through.

  Towards the end of the video, on the scarlet staircase, Freddie visibly favours his damaged right knee as he inevitably sits down on the stair and the whole manner in which he lowers himself indicates the pain he was in. We were in the studio on that day until very, very late, after a couple of bottles of vodka and champagne were brought in. Only Freddie’s immediate coterie stayed on to drink as everyone else was completely exhausted.

  Live performance film footage was used for the ‘Hammer To Fall’ video which was filmed just before the first show in Brussels on The Works tour in August 1984. It was directed by David Mallet.

  ‘Love Kills’ was Freddie’s contribution to the Metropolis project. It only utilised footage from the film itself but got to number ten in the UK charts.

  All the following taken from Freddie’s own Mr. Bad Guy album were filmed in Munich and thus, it was Joe Fanelli who was ‘on duty’ for these schedules. ‘I Was Born To Love You’, ‘Made In Heaven’ and ‘Living On My Own’. This latter video used footage of Freddie’s black and white birthday party held in Munich. There was a camera set up on a rig on the ceiling and it continually revolved filming the crowd for the whole evening. Filming was also done two days later, returning to the Mrs. Henderson bar where Freddie could include specific set pieces, again involving friends from Munich who had once again to don the same costumes and make-up. It could have been a nightmare of continuity but because the whole concept was a party, if there were any mistakes they went unnoticed.

  The occasion of Fashion Aid at London’s Albert Hall provided wonderful footage which shows Freddie dressed in a military-style tunic with solid silver chains and epaulettes, with a sashed pair of dark trousers all designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who came to fame after designing Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding dress. Freddie portrayed the dashing bare-foot bridegroom opposite Jane Seymour’s stunning bride as the finale of the Bob Geldof/Harvey Goldsmith inspired Fashion Aid Show for Africa. Anyone who has not seen the footage has missed out. Freddie was totally relaxed and was having a marvellous time and, as usual, he put on a quite magniftcent show.

  Dancers of the Royal Ballet danced in the Emanuel costumes designed for the Wayne Eagling ballet entitled Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus. We had a sort of rehearsal in the afternoon at the Park Lane Hotel where Freddie met up with quite a few of his co-models on that evening’s bill. The Marchioness of Douro, his friend Francesca Thyssen, Fiona Fullerton, Selina Scott, Anthony Andrews, Michael and Shakira Caine and Richard Branson. Arlene Phillips had worked with Freddie on ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ before and they had known each other from the Seventies.

  It is noticeable that Michael Caine was unamused as he watched Freddie’s outrageous antics, throwing the remnants of the bride’s bouquet to the assembled audience. It might have been outrageous but it was exactly the touch that the audience needed. It was a tricky manoeuvre guiding Freddie and Jane halfway round and a floor below the oval Albert Hall for their final entrance. I had no idea where we were going. I had a barefooted Freddie on one hand and the petite Jane Seymour on the other, her huge wedding train thrown over my arm beneath which even six-foot-two of me almost disappeared. It was a case of the blind leading the blind as we hadn’t rehearsed this move before.

  ‘One Vision’ was filmed over an extended period of time at Musicland Recording Studios in Munich. There was minor criticism alleging that the band were climbing on the Live Aid bandwagon as this single was made and released very soon after they had made their conquering appearance on the televised charity marathon. Whether or not this is true I don’t think is relevant because if they hadn’t done a single we would never have had the subsequent albums ‘A Kind Of Magic, The Miracle or Innuendo which by anybody’s standards must contain some of Queen’s best music. Never forget, ‘One Vision’ reaffirmed the faith of the band in themselves.

  A Kind Of Magic’ filmed in the Playhouse Theatre in Northumberland Avenue in London, once the home of many a BBC radio programme, was directed by Russell Mulcahy. Russell came over to the house and it was he who had the idea of the venue. Freddie and he then talked through the idea for hours and came up with the inspiration from the location. Because the Arches at Charing Cross was and is home to many of London’s homeless and people who sleep rough in the streets, that brought about the idea of Freddie being a magician who changes the reality for three down-and-outs (Brian, Roger and John) bringing them into the magic of the old abandoned theatre where he, Freddie, was once the star.

  Magically, Freddie just appears and disappears with his retinue of cartoon backing singers. Only halfway through do the transformed tramps realise something might be wrong when Roger turns quizzically to the camera. Joe Fanelli accompanied Freddie on this shoot as we had started to take video duty almost in turns depending on our other work and commitments. While it might seem to be an exciting part of the job, let me tell you that there are many long and boring hours involved and it wasn’t unheard of to be on call for twenty-four hours on the trot. What sticks in my mind most were Freddie’s comments about how, “…fucking cold it was!” He didn’t realise it could be so cold inside a building but the Playhouse Theatre hadn’t been in use for many months and had had no central heating. Considering the shoot was in March, the place had had a long winter in the freezing cold.

  After doing the shoot on the Time set, Freddie had had a drink or two and stayed while the audience came in and he started giving the ice creams away from an usherette’s tray. The schedule was short. The video had to be shot in the morning and afternoon of one day before an evening performance at the Dominion Theatre in London’s Tottenham Court Road. Freddie enjoyed resting in the star dressing room that had been specifically renovated and tented in cream silks and satins for Cliff Richard. Certainly a dressing room appropriate for rock’n’roll royalty.

  We were particularly amused!

  I have to mention, purely as an aside, Freddie’s penchant for nicknaming people also involved Cliff who, because of his huge collection of silver discs amassed over such a long career, was immediately dubbed Sylvia Disc. Neil Sedaka suffered the same fate and was called Golda Disc.

  ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ was filmed in a Wembley studio with huge audience participation. Once again, a Joe day. I stayed at home. There were eight hundred and fifty ecstatic Queen fans who found themselves cast as the audience. As a fee, they were all given a T-Shirt proclaiming the legend: I AM A QUEEN FRIEND. AT-shirt!!?!!

  ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ was filmed with Christopher Lambert to give continuity to the Highlander movie, in which he starred. This is another Mallet B. de Mille affair. The vast National Philharmonic and the forty unidentified choirboys give the authorship away. This was another of Joe’s video duty days. It was filmed in a warehouse at Tobacco Dock.

  There are two versions of ‘The Great Pretender’ video, one to accompany the single and the second, the twelve-inch version. They were both generally available at one point but as to their current availability, I know not.

  This shoot lasted three days and was filmed at two different studios. Straker was playing Ca
ssius in Julius Caesar at the Bristol Old Vic at the time and Freddie, Joe and I had driven down with Terry Giddings to see him. Debbie Ash was cast by the production company to play the real female interest and Roger …Well, Roger was just one of the girls. Denny was the hairdresser, Carolyn Cowan did the make-up and Diana Moseley supervised the complicated wardrobe. Terry Giddings acting as Sweeney Todd shaved various parts of the cast’s anatomies – i.e. chests and armpits!

  Very few people knew the real Freddie. To show he was indeed a pretender, in the video he used many of the personae portrayed in Queen and solo videos. By assembling them all together, it showed that he spent much of his work life pretending… It was quite a difficult task assembling the various costumes, stored in several places including Freddie’s and Diana Moseley’s lofts, which he had worn in the past as he had to wear them all again for this shoot.

  The twelve-inch version shows that while a five-minute promo takes three days to create, a lot of hard work goes into it but as is obvious from this footage, a great deal of fun can also be had. I suppose it’s the only way to keep the participants sane. Many people, including fans who have helped out by appearing in Queen videos, know that the majority of the time is spent sitting around getting exasperated. There is ten minutes of filming followed by four hours of rearranging the lights for the next shot. Is it all worth it? Answer, yes! Of course!

  The pink suit was designed and made by David Chambers who also made quite a few of Freddie’s suits including the dark blue tux seen in the video of ‘Barcelona’. The pink-suited Freddie was turned into a hundred cloned cardboard cut-outs for extra emphasis which appear, ranked either side on the grand staircase, at the end of the promo. David Mallet, the director, had originally wanted these standing on top of the white cliffs at Dover while a helicopter shot pulled away from Freddie standing amongst them. This idea was turned down by Freddie on two counts: first, the cost as the shot would have added thousands of pounds to the budget; and second, Freddie didn’t relish the thought of standing at the edge of the cliffs in the freezing cold!

  ‘Barcelona’ was filmed at least three times, twice in performance. The first was directed by Gavin Taylor at the KU nightclub on Ibiza, now renamed Privilege, the largest venue on the island. On this occasion, staged to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America, it was to be the first public performance of the song. There was no real rehearsal. Freddie stayed at Pikes Hotel and Montserrat stayed at a five star hotel in Ibiza town. Pino Sagliocco organised the show which included Duran Duran amongst others. Jim Beach was one of the executive producers along with Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis. Freddie was very nervous and I was sent on ahead to make sure the dressing room was okay and to be there when Montserrat arrived. She wore a blue dress originally designed for her role as the diva Ariadne in Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne Auf Naxos.

  I think because the KU appearance was Montserrat’s first exposure to this sort of gig, Freddie wanted to make sure that there was a familiar face around for her. It was strange that during the course of the evening I spent more time with Montserrat and her family – who were all there to support her – than I did with Freddie. But Freddie wasn’t alone by any means as he had the two Jims – Beach and Hutton – and Barbara Valentin with him as well as Mike Moran.

  The second filmed performance was at La Nit in Barcelona on the occasion of the delivery of the Olympic flag to that city in 1988. He and Montserrat were backed on stage on this occasion by Peter Straker and their friends Debbie Bishop and Madeleine Bell, both of whom were backing vocalists on the recording. Mike Moran, as always, supervised the musical arrangements performed by a local orchestra. On the same bill was Jose Carreras, his first perfomance after battling with leukaemia, Dionne Warwick, Eddy Grant, Rudolf Nureyev, Spandau Ballet und viel andere.

  It was a huge occasion, the dressing rooms being mere partitioned spaces in a vast hangar-like building. Everything that anyone said echoed around so all the participants tended to be very quiet. When Freddie and Montserrat appeared, she was obviously glowing in the adoration of her home Catalan crowd. It was her show after all. She had performed with Carreras and sung a song on her own with the orchestra. She sang an arrangement of an aria written for a tenor by Giuseppe Verdi called ‘Hymn Of The Nations’ in which, if you listen, you hear at least three or four different national anthems.

  Freddie’s nerves had only just quietened down from his meeting a scant hour or so before with the King and Queen of Spain and the royal family. Although his nervousness is apparent, Montserrat had the knack of responding to what is essentially a solo Freddie performance for, as you will understand, he had spent his stage life working only on his own or at best interacting with the other three members of Queen. If you watch this show, you see Montserrat’s instinctive reaction to Freddie’s movements and the whole duet works successfully. For those carpers who have invented so many reasons for the show not being sung live, including Freddie’s health, there was never any intention of this song being sung live. To produce any of Freddie’s live performances, a lot of intensive rehearsal took place. Time was a commodity then that neither of the artistes involved had much of.

  ‘Barcelona’ in its third incarnation was filmed at Shepperton or Pinewood. Freddie wore his dark blue evening suit and performed on a stage with hundreds of candles and once again a cast of thousands, drawn from the ever-eager fan club. ‘Golden Boy’ also used footage filmed during La Nit in Barcelona on the same occasion as the video for ‘Barcelona’. Montserrat is in the same blue dress but with a vast red evening coat with a long train. The drama on this occasion was that the backing track was out of time. It was being played slower than it should have been which made the making of the video extremely difficult as Freddie and Montserrat’s lip-synching was out of sequence with the recorded track which was used. A passable video was cobbled together but it wasn’t much seen.

  When Freddie came off stage, it was almost like the cartoons where you see steam coming out of people’s ears. He was absolutely furious as there was no chance to be able to re-take. He blamed any and everybody. The person nearest to hand to bear the brunt was sound engineer John Brough. There were a few present who wondered what was the matter with Freddie because the sound wasn’t noticeably slower except to an expert. Freddie knew it was slow because it was his track through and through and he realised the implications for the video.

  ‘I Want It All’, a rather nondescript video from 1989, was filmed at Elstree Film Studios and it was Joe’s turn that day. Watching it now I get the impression that Freddie didn’t really want to be there. He looks the archetypal angry young man and I don’t know how much of that was acting. The excessive use of lighting – sixteen supertrooper followspots, the ones made famous by ABBA, and twelve fifty-foot Dino football pitch lights – succeeds in bleaching out most of the footage. I think perhaps time was at a premium because, generally, when Queen didn’t have time, performance videos were the norm and they hadn’t performed in concert for two years. They needed to broadcast confirmation that they were still capable of performing as a band.

  ‘The Miracle’, directed by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, was filmed at Elstree Studios once again. Many children were auditioned to find the four lookalikes. The time spent was well worthwhile as the end result produced four very good doppel-gangers.

  Freddie Mercury, John Murphy and Joe Scardilli, in Vancouver.

  Lee Nolan, Freddie, John Murphy, Jim from New York and Jim Cruz in Vancouver.

  Thor Arnold, John Murphy, Freddie and friend in the hot tub 649 Stone Canyon Road, Los Angeles.

  Freddie and Thor Arnold in Los Angeles.

  Freddie blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, Los Angeles.

  Freddie with Vince The Barman, in LA.

  Freddie with Rod Stewart in Los Angeles.

  Bryn Brydenthal, Freddie and Jaqui Brownell in LA.

  Roger Taylor, Rod Stewart and Freddie, Los Angeles.

&nbs
p; Freddie at 649 Stone Canyon Road, LA.

  Freddie at 649 Stone Canyon Rd, and below with Jaqui Brownell.

  Fred Mandell, Rheinhold Mack, Freddie, Lee Nolan and Joe Scardilli, at the Record Plant in Los Angeles.

  Freddie at the grand piano.

  Freddie and friends, including author Peter Freestone (third from left) at the New York apartment at 425 East 58th Street.

  Freddie with Tony King.

  Thor Arnold, Peter Freestone, John Murphy, Patrick, Freddie and Lee Nolan in New York.

  Freddie gets a haircut at the 425 East 58th Street, NYC apartment.

  The Famous Hats, as modelled by Freddie and friends in New York; clockwise from bottom left: John Murphy, Joe Scardilli, Lee Nolan, Peter Freestone, Thor Arnold, Paul Prenter and Freddie.

  Freddie and Peter Freestone.

  Freddie in Munich.

  FM with Lee Nolan.

  FM at the Berkshire Place Hotel, New York.

  FM with Charles ‘The Canadian’ at the Berkshire Place Hotel.

  FM on a video shoot, 1983.